


five times carved, five times healed

by Kats_watermelon



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, memori week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 19:50:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14796831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kats_watermelon/pseuds/Kats_watermelon
Summary: written for memori week day 2, prompt: missing scene





	five times carved, five times healed

Emori is laying between John’s legs, her back resting against his chest as they sit in front of the fire and he plays absentmindedly with her hair. He moves from playing with her hair to tracing his fingers up and down her arms. She shuts her eyes, his touch relaxing. His hands wander from her arms to her face. He brushes a knuckle along the scar under her eye.

“Where did you get this?” he asks softly. Emori hums.

“That’s a sad story, John.”

“All my stories are sad, too.”

“Like how you got this?” She reaches up and knows instinctively where the small scar on the underside of his chin is. She runs her fingers along it and feels him swallow. She moves her hand to rest on his jaw and tips her head back to look at him. “Tell me what happened and I’ll tell you about mine.”

He kisses her forehead and murmurs something that she doesn’t catch. She waits for a minute, then he sighs and begins.

“A little girl in camp was having nightmares,” he says. “I guess Bellamy gave her some advice about slaying her demons and she took it the wrong way and thought the way to stop her nightmares was to stab this one kid in the neck. She stole my knife to do it, too. Unfortunately, that one kid was Clarke’s best friend, and she accused me of stabbing Wells in front of the whole camp. I told them I didn’t do it, but nobody believed me. I was kind of an ass back then, and I mean really an ass-”

“That assumes that you’re not an ass now,” Emori says, and John jabs her in the side, where she’s most ticklish, and she laughs, squirming in his arms. 

“My point is that I was not well-liked. Somebody suggested that they float me. They made a noose…..out of seatbelts, strung me up in a tree. They had me gagged, my hands were tied. The whole crowd was cheering for them to hang me for something I never even did.”

Emori looks up at him. He’s looking up, at the roof of the cave. She can see the little scar on the underside of his chin, pale and raised against his skin. She runs her fingers over it again.

“When Bellamy kicked the crate out from under me, the seatbelts cut into my skin. I was hanging there for a while before the little girl confessed and they cut me down. The seatbelts must have really dug in in that minute, because it scarred.”

“John,” Emori says softly, sadly. He looks down at her again, a practiced smile on his lips that she recognizes as just a con. She sits up and turns around so that she’s facing him, setting her hands on his face and forcing him to look at her.

“When I was a child,” she begins. “My brother and I worked for a man named Baylis. We stole for him. Anything we could, really - tech, food, supplies, clothes, even animals on a few occasions. He was cruel,” she says, her gaze dropping to his chest. “He was cruel and violent, and taught us to be the same way. The other scavengers were cruel and violent towards me and my brother. They thought they were better than us. They were outcasts like us, but at least they weren’t frikdreina.”

John turns his head and kisses her left palm. Emori’s eyes jump back to his. He’s looking at her with impossible softness. He kisses her palm again and quirks his eyebrows as a sign that she should continue her story. 

“It was only about four months before I met you,” she says, his lips against the palm of her left hand giving her a boost of confidence. “Baylis wanted me to steal something that I didn’t want to. I refused to do it, so he refused to let me eat. He was starving me. Otan was gone, off on another con, so I guess he thought he could bully me even more without my brother there. I hadn’t eaten in almost three days; I was desperate. I stole meat from him.”

John reaches up and sets his hand on her face, his thumb pushing over the small scar under her eye.

“When Otan came back five days later, Baylis had me tied to a tree, where every day, at the same time, he would come and reopen the same wound. He called it equal payment in the eyes of the gods. For every finger of my left hand, he would come back and carve a little deeper.” John’s eyes drop to the mutated hand and she sees him counting. “Otan got me out the night he came back.”

John says nothing, just looks at her. She almost laughs.

“I told you it was a sad story.”

He leans forward and she closes her eyes. He kisses the scar under her eye and she lets out a soft breath, her hands falling away from his face. He cups her jaw and pulls her close, kissing her eyelids and then the scar and then the corners of her mouth and then the scar and then her temples and then the scar and then the tears off her cheeks and then the scar.

“There,” he says. “Five times carved, five times healed.”

She laughs shakily, tears threatening to ruin the sound.

“I don’t think that’s how you heal scars,” she says. He pulls her into his chest, wrapping his arms around her, and she rests her head in the crook of his neck.

“It is now,” he says matter-of-factly. She laughs for real this time, the tears gone. She tips her head up and kisses the scar on the underside of his chin, keeping her lips on it for a minute.

“There,” she says softly. “One minute cut, one minute healed.”

He kisses the top of her head and she tucks herself into his chest, curling up in his lap, and together they start to let their less visible scars heal.


End file.
